On release earlier this year, Atomfall ingratiated itself to many by being so quintessentially, fundamentally, British. It mixed Fallout’s Atomic-era thrills with a tea-and-cake mentality that saw giant robots stomping past idyllic village bakeries, and had genial pub landlords stand alongside shell shocked squaddies to issue fetch quests and guidance. In Atomfall: Wicked Isle, we step away from the original campaign setting (albeit briefly) to travel to Midsummer Island, where a mysterious abbey holds a sought-after ingredient.
Risking your life to find something an NPC can easily either live without or go get themselves is par for the course here, though once you reach Midsummer Island you’ll find a few things to keep you occupied, even if you do return to the mainland a little too often. Part of the appeal of a DLC like this is immersing yourself in somewhere new, but Wicked Isle never quite lets you get all the way in.
Taking cues from things like The Wicker Man or the brand new 28 Years Later, Wicked Isle plays on the cult elements we already saw in Atomfall’s campaign. Most of the new enemies don’t feel all that new, although the Lovecraftian fishfolk are pretty cool. And while areas like the Abbey and the creepy fishing village you arrive at have their own distinct personalities, they don’t offer anything that feels too far removed from what we spent 12 to 20 hours doing before.
As with the main campaign, a lot of the appeal here comes from wandering off and exploring. NPCs offer intriguing side quests, and when Wicked Isle lets you stay on the isle itself and explore its mysteries, it’s just as compelling as the main game. But there are several missions that see you having to return to the previous area, which becomes really egregious when you remember there’s no fast travel in Atomfall.
You’ve got to traipse back and forth every time. Hell, you can’t even access your storage cache while on Midsummer because you can’t access the Interchange system that connected all of the main game’s areas and allowed you to get weapons and items via pneumatic tubes. Why not just contain the DLC here in Midsummer? I suspect probably because there’s just not much to really do overall.
It’s also not technically a separate story. You can’t access Midsummer after the campaign for narrative reasons, so if you’ve finished the game you’ll need to reload an early save to go explore. It’s worth a look if you really enjoyed Atomfall though, as its creepy, shadowy woods, and crumbling aesthetic do work well alongside the idyllic vistas of the campaign.
Atomfall: Wicked Isle also doesn’t really feature much in the way of new mechanics. There are no noteworthy set-pieces or boss encounters, no dazzling new weapons or perks. What Wicked Isle is, really, is another chunk of Atomfall roughly equivalent to any of the main game’s individual areas.
There are some nasty new enemies, and if you really enjoyed exploring the world looking for secrets and in-jokes, there’s more of that to do, but it’s a DLC that brings nothing to the main game except, well, more of the same. If you’re a big fan of the main game, then Atomfall: Wicked Isle will give you something to do for a few hours, otherwise you probably won’t miss much if you skip it altogether.
